New Fiction Wednesday

I’m excited to have my friend Allie Pleiter visiting my blog today, to tell us a little about her writing experiences and her newest release – one of my favorite kinds. A Christmas tale! That time of year is right around the corner, you know (and if you’ve been in any malls lately, they’re already reminding us of that).

So without further ado, here’s Allie’s guest post:

I’m lousy starting a book. I’m a mess until I find that single nugget, that tiny thread I start pulling which eventually becomes a story.

Back before I was published, I could wait for that nugget to find me. Now, the nugget fairy (or, what I more precisely hope is the Holy Spirit) hasn’t read my contract due date, and I have to go looking for it. Hunt it down. I have bent my knees more than once and prayed in date-driven desperation for the story to come to me pronto.

You’d think I have learned by now that God always sends the story. I’ve never missed a proposal deadline yet, after a dozen books. But does that stop me from pacing the floor, trying to force something out of my imagination? I’d have as much results by standing at an apple tree in May and trying to coax apples out of the leaves. I have prayed and asked for the story to come to me. It’s due next week. I’ll get there–I know that on some level–but I don’t trust nearly enough to bring my blood pressure down.

I wrote the above paragraph one week ago. Four days after that, while pacing the floor and bemoaning my problem to my long-suffering husband, the story came to me. Like it always has. Like, I pray, it always will. If I believe God has “begun this good work in me,” should I not also trust him “to see it to completion”?

Of course I should.

Ah, but if we all did what we should do, then I wouldn’t have much conflict to write about between my characters now, would I?